JEP 248: Make G1 the Default Garbage Collector

[Vitaly Davidovich]

Also, G1 also has heavier write barriers than parallel gc, so some existing
workloads that don't stress the GC (e.g. code written purposely to avoid GC
during uptime by, say, object pooling) and wouldn't have tweaked the
default may experience some degradation.

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 2:53 PM, charlie hunt <charlie.hunt at oracle.com>
wrote:

> Hi Jenny,
>
> A couple questions and comments below.
>
> thanks,
>
> charlie
>
> > On Jun 1, 2015, at 1:28 PM, Yu Zhang <yu.zhang at oracle.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have done some performance comparison g1/cms/parallelgc internally at
> Oracle.  I would like to post my observations here to get some feedback, as
> I have limited benchmarks and hardware.  These are out of box performance.
> >
> > Memory footprint/startup:
> > g1 has bigger memory footprint and longer start up time. The overhead
> comes from more gc threads, and internal data structures to keep track of
> remember set.
>
> This is the memory footprint of the JVM itself when using the same size
> Java heap, right?
>
> I don’t recall if it has been your observation?  One observation I have
> had with G1 is that it tends to be able to operate within tolerable
> throughput and latency with a smaller Java heap than with Parallel GC.  I
> have seen cases where G1 may not use the entire Java heap because it was
> able to keep enough free regions available yet still meet pause time goals.
> But, Parallel GC always use the entire Java heap, and once its occupancy
> reach capacity, it would GC. So they are cases where between the JVM’s
> footprint overhead, and taking into account the amount of Java heap
> required, G1 may actually require less memory.
>
> >
> > g1 vs parallelgc:
> > If the workload involves young gc only, g1 could be slightly slower.
> Also g1 can consume more cpu, which might slow down the benchmark if SUT is
> cpu saturated.
> >
> > If there are promotions from young to old gen and leads to full gc with
> parallelgc, for smaller heap, parallel full gc can finish within some range
> of pause time, still out performs g1.  But for bigger heap, g1 mixed gc can
> clean the heap with pause times a fraction of parallel full gc time, so
> improve both throughput and response time.  Extreme cases are big data
> workloads(for example ycsb) with 100g heap.
>
> I think what you are saying here is that it looks like if one can tune
> Parallel GC such that you can avoid a lengthy collection of old generation,
> or the live occupancy of old gen is small enough that the time to collect
> is small enough to be tolerated, then Parallel GC will offer a better
> experience.
>
> However, if the live data in old generation at the time of its collection
> is large enough such that the time it takes to collect it exceeds a
> tolerable pause time, then G1 will offer a better experience.
>
> Would also say that G1 offers a better experience in the presences of
> (wide) swings in object allocation rates since there would likely be a
> larger number of promotions during the allocation spikes?  In other words,
> G1 may offer more predictable pauses.
>
> >
> > g1 vs cms:
> > I will focus on response time type of workloads.
> > Ben mentioned
> >
> > "Having said that, there is definitely a decent-sized class of systems
> > (not just in finance) that cannot really tolerate any more than about
> > 10-15ms of STW. So, what usually happens is that they live with the
> > young collections, use CMS and tune out the CMFs as best they can (by
> > clustering, rolling restart, etc, etc). I don't see any possibility of
> > G1 becoming a viable solution for those systems any time soon."
> >
> > Can you give more details, like what is the live data set size, how big
> is the heap, etc?  I did some cache tests (Oracle coherence) to compare cms
> vs g1. g1 is better than cms when there are fragmentations. If you tune cms
> well to have little fragmentation, then g1 is behind cms.  But for those
> cases, they have to tune CMS very well, changing default to g1 won't impact
> them.
> >
> > For big data kind of workloads (ycsb, spark in memory computing), g1 is
> much better than cms.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Jenny
> >
> > On 6/1/2015 10:06 AM, Ben Evans wrote:
> >> Hi Vitaly,
> >>
> >>>> Instead, G1 is now being talked of as a replacement for the default
> >>>> collector. If that's the case, then I think we need to acknowledge it,
> >>>> and have a conversation about where G1 is actually supposed to be
> >>>> used. Are we saying we want a "reasonably high throughput with reduced
> >>>> STW, but not low pause time" collector? If we are, that's fine, but
> >>>> that's not where we started.
> >>> That's a fair point, and one I'd be interesting in hearing an answer
> to as
> >>> well.  FWIW, the only GC I know of that's actually used in low latency
> >>> systems is Azul's C4, so I'm not even sure Oracle is trying to target
> the
> >>> same use cases.  So when we talk about "low latency" GCs, we should
> probably
> >>> also be clear on what "low" actually means.
> >> Well, when I started playing with them, "low latency" meant a
> >> sub-10-ms transaction time with 100ms STW as acceptable, if not ideal.
> >>
> >> These days, the same sort of system needs a sub 500us transaction
> >> time, and ideally no GC pause at all. But that leads to Zing, or
> >> non-JVM solutions, and I think takes us too far into a specialised use
> >> case.
> >>
> >> Having said that, there is definitely a decent-sized class of systems
> >> (not just in finance) that cannot really tolerate any more than about
> >> 10-15ms of STW. So, what usually happens is that they live with the
> >> young collections, use CMS and tune out the CMFs as best they can (by
> >> clustering, rolling restart, etc, etc). I don't see any possibility of
> >> G1 becoming a viable solution for those systems any time soon.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> Ben
> >
>
>